an occasional view of internal craft and external insanity

Another Return Attempt (let's see if it sticks)

So I've been gone for many months from here, but intending to return. Just haven't felt like I had much to say, or rather, what I had to say fit better on Facebook. But some people might actually venture here from Zack Calhoun's blog Visible Soul, where I was just cyber-interviewed, and if so, here's the deal about this link and where it's going . . .

I'll try and get back to making this blog interesting again by discussing the process for my August season as it's going on. This year, I'll be doing three plays, Removal, a new one that seems to be becoming some kind of farce; Blvd de Paris, a classic play by Richard Foreman I've been wanting to get to; and Invincible City, a text created through improvisation by myself and David Finkelstein of Lake Ivan Performance Group, which David has already transformed into a piece of video art. The last two pieces will play on a double-bill.

So . . . as I work on these shows, I'll keep some of my process journal going here as I used to. I always seemed to work as both a place for dialogue and as a kind of promotion for the shows, so I should get back to it. The last few years, the shows have been big and I've been tired (and/or lazy), but I'd like to get back to an account of what goes into making one of these shows.

I also have some longer pieces I've been working on that might finally get done and wind up here. I've been working on something called "So Big It Can Never Be Catalogued or Appraised: Thoughts on Pieces of Citizen Kane" (which is exactly what it sounds like), and I put in a proposal that was (just today) sadly rejected for a book in the great 33 1/3rd series of monographs from Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic. My proposal was for the Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It For The Money, and I did enough research, thinking, and writing about that work (and related ones) just for the proposal that I should probably just write the book anyway and post in in pieces here.

At the current moment, I'm in the dressing room of The Brick supervising a tech for the Democracy festival that opens tonight. When not writing this I'm going through David's video of Invincible City and transcribing it, so I should be getting back to that. By the end of the weekend, I'm hoping to have all these shows cast, but that seems . . . unlikely. I'll let you know when I do. So more on the current projects soon.

Amazingly, when I went to open a new posting window here for this blog, I got a "Restore from saved draft?" window from LiveJournal. Yup, there was an old "Friday Random Ten" that I had typed up but not finished, long enough ago that the playlist of unheard songs I was working through had 9,456 songs in it (it now has 8,655). So from sometime in the past, and as a welcome back to this blog, here's a Friday Random Ten from January 6 of this year . . .